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At first glance, Jerome Powell doesn’t come across as a member of the #Resistance. Lean, angular, and somewhat awkward in public, the chairman of the Federal Reserve looks like a central-casting version of a Wasp banker from the nineteen-fifties. Actually, his paternal lineage is Roman Catholic: his uncle was a priest. Otherwise, though, Powell’s résumé fits to a tee that of an East Coast prepster: Georgetown Prep; Princeton; Georgetown Law; the law firm Davis Polk; the investment bank Dillon Read, where his mentor was Nicholas Brady, who served as Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and in 1990 gave him his first government job, as an Assistant Secretary for Domestic Finance. (Subsequently, Powell was promoted to Under-Secretary.)

After leaving the Treasury in 1993, Powell, who is often referred to as Jay, returned to Wall Street. In 1997, he joined the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm that was known for buying and selling defense businesses and making large profits. In 2005, he left and ran his own firm for a few years. Eventually, he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank, where his advocacy for fiscal prudence attracted the notice of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration. Although Powell was a registered Republican, in 2012 Obama appointed him as a governor on the Fed’s board, and in 2018 Donald Trump, much to his eventual regret, elevated him to chair. A little more than a year later, after the central bank had failed to cut interest rates as he demanded, Trump tweeted: “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi.”

Which all adds up to this: Powell is an old-school establishment figure of the sort that Trump resents, and the bad blood between them, which spilled over last weekend, when the Fed chair revealed that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into him, isn’t new. For a long time, Powell ignored Trump’s jibes and threats, which, after the latter’s return to the White House, escalated into personal insults and allegations that the Fed chair had grossly mismanaged a costly renovation project. Last year, Powell’s former boss, David Rubenstein, who co-founded the Carlyle Group, remarked, “Jay has been very good at basically keeping his head down, not criticizing anybody who’s criticizing him, and just dealing with the problems that the Fed sees.”

This changed last Friday, when Jeanine Pirro, a lawyer and former Fox News co-host who is now the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., served the Fed with grand-jury subpoenas demanding documents relating to the renovation project and Powell’s statements to Congress. On Sunday night, Powell recorded a short video in which he broke the news about the subpoenas and said, “This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. . . . Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public rather than following the preferences of the President.” Powell also vowed not to buckle, saying, “Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats.”

This statement, which the central bank posted on its website, amounted to an unprecedented repudiation of a President by a sitting Fed chair. It caused a political eruption—and not just among Democrats. For once, some elected Republicans spoke up. Remarking that the subpoenas had thrown into doubt the “independence and credibility of the Department of Justice,” Senator Thom Tillis, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, vowed to block any new nominations to the Fed, including a potential replacement for Powell, whose term as chair ends in May. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, publicly backed Tillis’s stance and suggested that Congress should investigate the Justice Department. Even John Thune, the Majority Leader in the upper chamber, voiced disquiet, saying that the allegations against Powell had “better be real.”

It soon emerged that Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, also had reservations, if not for the same reasons. After learning of the subpoenas on Friday evening, Bessent reportedly called Trump and told him that they would create difficulties in Congress—an accurate prediction, it turned out—and could also make it more likely that Powell would decide to stay on after May as an ordinary member of the Fed board, an option he can exercise because his term as a regular governor doesn’t expire until January, 2028. If Powell did remain on the board, it would deny Trump the opportunity to appoint another governor more amenable to his wishes.

Not for nothing did the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal describe the criminal investigation of Powell as “lawfare for dummies.” Trump insisted that he didn’t know anything about the subpoenas. So did Bill Pulte, the Florida housebuilder who now serves as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and who was a key instigator of the trumped-up mortgage-fraud charges against another Fed governor, Lisa Cook, which Trump used to issue an order firing her. (The Supreme Court is due to hear that case next week.) The denials from Trump and Pulte would perhaps be a bit more believable absent a Washington Post report that the two of them recently dined at Mar-a-Lago and that Pulte brought along with him a mocked-up “Wanted” poster featuring an image of Powell. (In a post on X, Pulte denied that the meeting happened.)

Pirro seems to have been assigned the role of fall gal. Someone, presumably at the Justice Department, let it be known that Pirro hadn’t informed the higher-ups there before issuing the subpoenas. An unnamed Administration official told Axios that Pirro “went rogue.” This, even though she’s known Trump for decades and surely took her cues from his attacks on Powell. Just last week, Trump criticized a group of U.S. Attorneys at the White House for not moving fast enough in prosecuting his favored targets, the Journal reported. Pirro, for her part, blamed the victim, claiming that the Fed hadn’t replied to her office’s requests for information. “None of this would have happened if they had just responded to our outreach,” she said.

A likely story. As President, Trump is free to criticize the Fed’s interest-rate policies—counterproductive as such a step usually proves—and even to argue that the Administration should have more say in the central bank’s policy deliberations, as it did before the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, which separated debt management (the Treasury’s preserve) from monetary policy (the Fed’s bailiwick). But the Fed is an independent agency that operates under the oversight of Congress and the gaze of the financial markets. To change how it works and impose his will, Trump would need the acquiescence of both, which he surely wouldn’t get, and for good reason. The criminal inquiry into Powell smacked of “how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions, with highly negative consequences for inflation and the functioning of their economies more broadly,” a bipartisan group of former Fed chairs and White House economic advisers pointed out in a statement this week. To put it another way, would you trust Trump to set interest rates?

The authoritarian aspect is glaring. In using cost overruns as a pretext for going after Powell criminally, the Trump Administration demonstrated, yet again, its contempt for the institutions of governance and the legal system. Powell deserves credit for fighting back. On receiving the subpoenas last week, he could theoretically have responded with a bland statement that the Fed would coöperate with any legitimate inquiry, and, meanwhile, get on with its work. With his job up in a few months, that would have amounted to keeping his head down again and relying on the courts to strike down any indictment that might come in the future. Instead, he took the advice that he issued to the Princeton class of 2025 in a baccalaureate address last May: “Throw yourself into the deep end of the pool. . . . Take risks.”

The seventy-two-year-old Fed chair put to shame the heads of law firms, universities, and public companies who have caved to the White House. He also demonstrated that, at least in the economic arena, there are still some institutional constraints that Trump cannot sweep aside, or not easily. Tragically, these guardrails are being trampled underfoot in other areas, including the streets of some American cities, where Trump’s immigration police are running amok. Compared with that outrage, a U.S. Attorney issuing subpoenas to the Fed may seem like a matter of minor import, but it’s part of the same larger phenomenon: Presidential abuse of power. And, in his own way, Jay Powell is standing up to it. ♦

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Someone looking to understand America might do well to study the nation’s embrace of football. N.F.L. games regularly outperform anything else on television, and, in 2025, some hundred and twenty-seven million viewers tuned in to the Super Bowl—more than ever before. As this year’s championship approaches, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz are joined by their fellow New Yorker writer Louisa Thomas to unpack the sport’s allure, which has persisted despite increasingly dire evidence of the danger it poses to players’ health. Together, they discuss football’s origins as a “war game,” how fictional depictions have contributed to its mythos, and the state of play today. “A very compelling reason for football’s popularity is that it's not only a simulation of war,” Thomas says. “It’s a simulation of community.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Friday Night Lights” (2006–11)
“The West Wing” (1999–2006)
“Football,” by Chuck Klosterman
“The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” by Reeves Wiedeman (New York magazine)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s easy to put off saving for retirement, to tell yourself that you’ll deal with it later. After all, you have so many expenses right now. But, the younger you are when you start saving, the more compound interest can help you reach your goals. And research shows that you need five hundred million-plus dollars to retire comfortably if the final thirty to sixty years of your life become an unrelenting series of disasters, each more horrible than the last.

If your company offers 401(k) matching, the bare minimum you should do is set aside the percentage of your paycheck that they’ll match, and put it into a retirement account. That’s free money! So if your employer will match three per cent, find a way to invest that three per cent. As a retiree, you’ll be on a fixed income. That puts you at the mercy of rising costs, and even in the best of economies you should expect some inflation. Furthermore, you’ll want to prepare for when you’re fired fifteen years before you’d planned to retire and, after spending two years on a job search, futilely applying for a thousand positions, lowering your standards until you’re willing to work for almost nothing, in a field that you hate, you realize that you’ll never work again. Around that point, you’ll be glad you kicked in what you could to your retirement fund when you were younger. In fact, let’s make your minimum contribution four per cent.

Being permanently excluded from the workforce for reasons that are not provably age discrimination may be dispiriting, but, as long as you’ve set aside four per cent of your seven-figure salary, you may think you’ll still be able to retire in style. Indeed, it might seem that way until, just after you come to terms with your unemployability, your house is carried away by a large drone with claws, like in one of those arcade games at the bowling alley. Buying a new house is going to set you back, and that’s why we recommend putting an additional twenty per cent of your income during your working years into a Roth IRA. Presuming your salary is high, that twenty per cent is mid-six-figures or more. If your account yields good interest, that should set you up to make a down payment on a new, smaller house that’s bolted to its foundation so a drone can’t steal it.

Unemployed and exhausted, you may feel a sense of relief as you cross the threshold of your new house. This is why you put aside a big nest egg. But another common concern for retirees is what happens when cockroaches develop superintelligence and, enraged by the way humans have historically treated them, overrun their homes—including the pathetic little replacement shack you spent most of your remaining money on. No ordinary exterminator can vanquish these genius roaches, who are not only brilliant but also full of a white-hot thirst for revenge that can never be sated.

The team of researchers you hire to work around the clock to hatch a system for defeating the bugs will fall short. If they get close to a solution, they’ll be hired away by the roaches, who have an unparalleled knack for manipulation, and saved a lot in their youth. If you want the roaches to go away, you will need to buy them off. And freedom from the roaches does not come cheap. We’re talking eight-figure payments every month until you croak or they do. This is why you need assets that grow in value constantly, like original paintings by legendary artists, or houses that haven’t been carried away by drones or invaded by mastermind insects.

Saving for retirement can be intimidating, but it’s well worth the effort to set aside five hundred million dollars now for when you’ll need it later. Let that be your motivation for restraint the next time you’re tempted to splurge on a latte. ♦

Last week, after Donald Trump sent the United States military into Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia criticized it as an act of “aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America.” It was the latest in an escalating series of jibes between two countries that have historically been allies. In response, Trump called Petro a “sick man” who was involved in shipping cocaine to the U.S., said that he should “watch his ass,” and told reporters that a military operation against Petro “sounds good to me.”

Petro, like Trump, is a compulsive user of social media, and though aides have tried to restrain his messaging, he has become Trump’s most outspoken leftist critic in the region. After the U.S. began striking alleged drug boats in the waters off Venezuela, this past September, Petro derided Trump as a “barbarian” and the campaign as “murder.” (He also suggested that the campaign was intended to distract from the Epstein files, warning that “a clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy.”) Trump called Petro a “thug,” accused him of being an “illegal drug leader,” and placed sanctions on him and members of his family.

Trump’s incursion into Venezuela seemed to have brought the relationship to a dangerous inflection point. Petro called for rallies to be held across Colombia on January 7th, “in defense of the national sovereignty.” In an impassioned video shared through social media, he recalled an old adage predicting that the eagle (the United States) would one day attack the jaguar (the people of Colombia). “Be careful, Trump and Rubio,” he said. “If the golden eagle dares to attack, they will find the jaguar awakening powerfully, and history will be changed forever.”

That evening, in Bogota’s Plaza de Bolívar, a chanting crowd waved Colombian flags and held up placards: “Shitty Gringos, Respect Colombia,” “Petro Is Not a Narcotrafficker.” Petro, who is not known for his punctuality, arrived an hour and a half late. A man of moderate height with professorial glasses and longish hair, he stood with an entourage of aides and bodyguards on a stage surrounded with Christmas lights left over from recent festivities. A cheer went up as he came to the microphone. Petro announced that he had prepared another speech, but at the last minute something had happened to change his mind.

People’s phones were already flashing with a news alert that Petro and Trump had spoken by phone. After half an hour of folksy disquisition, Petro finally got around to describing the conversation. He told the crowd that he and Trump had recognized that “if we don’t talk, we’re screwed. We’ll kill each other.” The risk of an attack had ebbed, but the outcome would ultimately depend on a meeting between the two leaders.

After years of fiercely criticizing Trump, Petro surprised the crowd by saying that he and the American President had agreed on some things. One was a sense of the evils of narcotrafficking; Petro recited a litany of statistics about Colombia’s efforts to halt drug smuggling. The people in the plaza alternately booed and clapped, unsure whether to welcome the détente. Memes circulated afterward suggesting that Petro had caved to Trump, or that the two were newfound amigos. To compound the surreal mood, Petro’s office issued a meme that showed a bald eagle snuggling up to a jaguar.

Two days later, Petro agreed to speak with me in his office. I arrived on time, then waited for several hours while Petro held an emergency meeting with the commander of his security forces. Finally, an aide explained that another concern had arisen: Petro had received a note from Trump, inviting him to Washington on February 3rd, and had summoned his cabinet to discuss it. But, the aide said, the President would see me first. While his ministers gathered in a hallway, Petro spoke with me for ninety minutes.

Petro sat in a favorite leather armchair, dressed comfortably in sneakers, slacks, and a white cardigan; a female assistant was combing his hair. The office had the lived-in look of a grad-school apartment. There was a blanket folded on the couch, and papers and books chaotically piled on a coffee table and a desk. A rumpled paper map of Colombia hung on an easel. Among the bric-a-brac was a large collection of hats—baseball caps, wide-brimmed straw hats, an Indigenous headdress with green and red parrot feathers.

Petro was characteristically unhurried. The last time I had seen him was in 2023, near the end of his first year in office. Then, as ever, Petro had seemed to inhabit his own thoughts, speaking for more than two hours on a sprawling range of topics. He talked at length about a book on capitalism and climate change that he was writing between Presidential obligations. He also complained that the palace was cold and uncomfortable. When a Presidential military band in the plaza outside struck up its usual afternoon tune, he closed the shutters and grimaced, saying that they drove him crazy.

Now sixty-five, Petro is a survivor of a brutal era in which the Colombian state assassinated leftist leaders and butchered their followers, in an effort to quell the country’s Marxist guerrilla forces. The death toll over thirty-five years is estimated to be well more than four hundred thousand. In the eighties, Petro was a member of the M-19, urban insurgents who caught the world’s attention by taking the American Ambassador and more than a dozen other foreign diplomats hostage for two months. They also seized the country’s Palace of Justice, in a bloody showdown.

Petro entered politics in the nineties, after Colombia’s government agreed to an amnesty, and served as a congressman and as the mayor of Bogotá. In 2022, he became the country’s first left-wing President. He began his first term with a dramatic speech at the U.N. General Assembly, in which he called for a halt to global hydrocarbon use and for a new policy of decriminalization to end the bloody, futile war on drugs. He also announced a “Total Peace” effort to solve his country’s myriad insurgencies by negotiating with all the fighting factions.

Not many of these goals have been achieved; Petro’s Presidential initiatives have been largely symbolic. As the number of armed fighters in the countryside seems only to have grown, Petro has broken off talks and gone to war, dismissing the rebels as dressed-up drug pushers. He has also made little headway on decriminalizing drugs. Despite having once claimed that “cocaine is no more harmful than whiskey,” he now talks mostly about the coca crops his government has destroyed. As for his climate-change agenda, he has halted new petroleum exploration, but Colombia still exports oil and coal; because of the abrupt transition, it must import natural gas to meet its needs.

Petro’s self-assured stubbornness has won him many adversaries, but, in the Plaza de Bolívar, his followers called out to him with almost religious fervor. By getting elected and surviving in office, he has reversed the state’s repression of leftist groups. In a gesture to the working class, he has extended universal pensions to elderly Colombians and raised the minimum wage by twenty-four per cent. Skeptics in the business community say that the increased wages will simply inflate prices. Nevertheless, in a country with widespread poverty, such efforts resonate. In recent polls, roughly a quarter of Colombians say that they regard themselves as leftists—a measure of what Petro calls “the desire for change in an unequal country.”

After the U.S. attacked Caracas, Petro went on X to suggest that a historical line had been crossed: “The first South American capital bombed, like the Hitlerian bombing of Guernica, cannot be forgotten. Friends do not bomb.” When I asked about the tumult in the region, he began by saying that he had liked and admired Hugo Chávez, who set in motion Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution” a quarter century ago. He didn’t feel the same way about Chávez’s successor, Maduro. Although he rejected Trump’s claims that Maduro was a drug trafficker—“First of all, they don’t have coca fields. That’s in Colombia”—he expressed little admiration. “Chávez’s movement ended up in Maduro’s hands, and became a series of factions, including the military, that wanted to control oil,” he said. “The Maduro model in its final stage brought on a process of degradation that still hasn’t bottomed out.”

Trump had made it clear that he was leaving Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge. Petro described Rodríguez as a friend and said that he would help her however he could. It would not be easy for her to accommodate the more militant members of her security forces while also appeasing the U.S. But he said that he hoped her government would be able to find a way forward: “As long as there is trust and elections are called, Trump is going to realize that either he becomes more violent, with increasingly serious problems—in Venezuela, in the world, and in his own country—or he gets involved in the rules of the game that already exist.”

Before the recent call, Petro’s contact with Trump came largely in the form of trash talk online. “From the first day of Trump’s government, there was never any communication with us,” he told me. “If two Presidents don’t communicate, the governments fill that vacuum with another force.” At the start of Trump’s second term, the U.S. deported Colombian nationals in shackles on military planes, and Petro prohibited the aircraft from landing in Colombia. In a Twitter exchange that stretched on for most of a day, Trump ranted at Petro and threatened sharp tariffs on Colombian exports, while Petro likened himself to a rebellious, doomed hero of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Petro finally assented, after several former Colombian Presidents offered to help smooth things over, and the relationship calmed down. But the episode prefigured Trump’s dealings with leaders of other nations, from Canada to Panama. “I thought all the Presidents were going to do the same,” Petro said, recalling his initial defiance. Instead, they mostly chose to appease the U.S.

The recent call came about at the urging of Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky. The timing was not auspicious. The night before, Petro had gone on X to reject accusations that he was involved in narcotrafficking, writing, “The title that Trump assigns me as an outlaw of the drug trade is a reflection of his senile brain.” But Petro told me that Trump had struck a light tone when they spoke. “He didn’t want to get involved in substantive discussions,” he said. “He simply wanted to build communication.” When Petro insisted that the accusations of his involvement in the drug trade were false, Trump was solicitous: “He said, ‘You’re surrounded by lies, just like me.’ ”

Affinity will go only so far. In the forthcoming meeting in Washington, Trump is likely to insist that Colombia offer coöperation on immigration and natural resources, two areas in which he and Petro have strikingly different views. In Petro’s telling, right-wing politicians throughout the world have cynically used immigration as a wedge issue. “The fear of foreigners is the same as what existed in Germany regarding the Jews,” he said. “What it generates are far-right political proposals,” which “arise from fear and lies.”

An attendee looks on at the rally in Bogotá, on January 7th.

Trump is also likely to demand that Petro and Delcy Rodríguez take on the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, Colombia’s largest guerrilla group. The E.L.N. controls much of the border between the two countries, in addition to large portions of Venezuela’s interior—including the area where its valuable minerals are concentrated. The E.L.N. operated with Maduro’s approval, and is believed to have allies in the Venezuelan security forces. Trump’s intervention is unlikely to succeed unless the E.L.N. can be brought under control.

Petro told me that he wanted to offer Trump a deal. “I’m going to propose the alliance you want, but on the basis of clean energy,” he said. He recalled writing to Trump some time ago, proposing a “Pact of the Americas” to help solve environmental crises. Petro didn’t think that Trump read the letter, but he still hoped to make a persuasive pitch. “We would push the climate crisis further back,” he said. “It would be a service to humanity.” If that failed, he said, he would emphasize that he and Trump were aligned against narco gangs: “You don’t have a better warrior in Colombia against drug trafficking than me. Thirty-five per cent of the Senate ended up in jail thanks to me. I denounced the mafias that governed Colombia.”

It was not lost on Petro that Trump has withdrawn from every global initiative on climate change and conservation. “Trump’s vision is to seize oil, seize coal,” he said. He suggested that it was an inevitable effect of capitalist consumption. “The idea of private property has led them to think that oil and everything underground belongs to the landowner,” he said. “That doesn’t exist in Latin America. And when Trump says, ‘We took the oil,’ ‘They stole our oil,’ etc., those are phrases that are steeped in that culture.”

He suggested that the U.S. was dismantling the international system out of anxiety. “When the United States begins to fear losing global control to China, the desperation to control coal and oil reserves increases exponentially,” he told me. In Venezuela, where China is the largest buyer of oil, the competition between the two superpowers had become strikingly direct. If it wasn’t handled carefully, Petro said, “a world war will break out.”

Petro saw dire stakes. “The climate crisis brings barbarism because it brings migration,” he said. “There are three billion people who are going to go north if we let nothing happen between now and 2070. We’re heading toward World War III and climate collapse combined. That’s called the collapse of humanity.” Already, he said, “the United States is a society on the verge of division. Smart politicians unite people. Those who lead to collapse will be forgotten. Trump needs to understand that.”

Ultimately, Petro may not have much leverage, in the U.S. or at home. With eight months remaining in his term, Colombia is as much drawn to the right as to the left. Its Army, one of the largest in the hemisphere, is closely tied to the United States. When I asked Petro what he intended to do after leaving office, he said that it depended on whether he remained under sanctions, which prevented him from travelling to the U.S. He explained, a little wistfully, that he used to visit often, attending talks and giving speeches.

Back when Petro was a guerrilla, the M-19 carried out a symbolic operation to steal a sword that once belonged to the nineteenth-century liberator Simón Bolívar. In his office, Petro showed a hint of his old bravado when we spoke about his recent appearance in the Plaza de Bolívar. He had talked ruefully that night about having written a more forceful speech, and I asked what he’d had in mind. Was he planning to come out waving a machete and calling for armed struggle? “Kind of, yes,” he said, chuckling. What would have happened if he’d given that speech? Would Trump have come after him? Petro smiled and suggested that he would have been ready. “We’ve survived by moving and living clandestinely our whole lives,” he said. “A person like me has to know how to disguise himself.” ♦

Last week, Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old woman in Minneapolis, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in a shooting that has now been seen by people around the world and led to protests across the country. Some senior Trump Administration officials have labelled Good a “domestic terrorist” and claimed that she was trying to run over the ICE agent with her car. At a press conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance defended the agent, claiming that federal law-enforcement officials are protected by “absolute immunity.” Footage of Good’s death was only the latest in a string of viral videos of ICE personnel engaging in violent behavior toward citizens and noncitizens alike. (The Atlantic reported last year that, as part of the Administration’s efforts to swell its roster of ICE agents, training for new agents was cut by nearly two-thirds to just forty-seven days, a number chosen because Donald Trump is the forty-seventh President.)

I recently spoke on the phone with Deborah Fleischaker, who, during the Biden Administration, served as the acting chief of staff of ICE, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, and who, before that, was a civil servant in the D.H.S. Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how ICE has and has not changed during the Trump Administration, the procedures and regulations that ICE is supposed to follow, and the dangers of an out-of-control law-enforcement agency.

I was hoping we could start by talking about what exactly ICE’s rules of engagement are, and how they differ from the rules of engagement for other law-enforcement officers. When can they demand I.D., for instance? Can they tell anyone to get out of a car, or stop people on the street?

Let me just make sure we’re talking about the same thing, because ICE has two main sides. It has Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (E.R.O.). And, because you’re talking about immigration enforcement, you’re talking mainly about E.R.O. H.S.I. handles child exploitation and fentanyl and things like that.

ICE’s immigration-enforcement authorities follow many of the same rules of standard criminal procedure. Is there reasonable suspicion? What are they investigating? Do they have a reason to think that somebody may be in violation of the law? And they tend to go from there. So, if they see somebody and they believe they have “reasonable suspicion” that somebody may not be in the country legally, they can stop and question them.

I would imagine that “reasonable suspicion” gives a certain amount of leeway to law-enforcement officials. What or who regulates the officials making those judgements?

Law-enforcement officers, including ICE, have huge amounts of discretion in almost everything they do, and “reasonable suspicion” is no different. It is something that can be taken advantage of, and I think we’re probably seeing that now. There are ways that you could have real rules and regulations around how to define “reasonable suspicion.” As a general matter, it is defined by case law, through Supreme Court and lower-court decisions. ICE used to work hard to follow case law. I don’t know if that is still true. And obviously some officer could not really have had “reasonable suspicion” and nothing happened because nobody brought a lawsuit.

And then there are other ways of handling it, more internal ways, like internal oversight and accountability measures. I used to be at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and I would do some of those sorts of investigations, but a lot of those mechanisms that previously existed to try and bring reasonableness and rationality to the whole D.H.S. endeavor, including ICE, have really been gutted beyond all recognition.

So, if an ICE officer wants to demand I.D. from someone to prove that they’re a citizen, the officer can do that if they have “reasonable suspicion” that they are not a citizen?

So let me actually make another distinction. There are consensual encounters and there are nonconsensual encounters. If somebody wants to coöperate, ICE can ask for anything. It’s just a question of whether you must comply or not. So ICE can go up to somebody and say, “Can I see your I.D.?” And if it’s a consensual encounter and the person says, “I don’t want to talk to you,” and walks away, there’s nothing inappropriate about that. The question is: Would the ICE officer then decide that the reaction contributes to a “reasonable suspicion” and it becomes a nonconsensual encounter—as in, they then arrest them?

So, there is a process here, but it leaves a lot of discretion for ICE officers to decide how to deal with these things.

Yes. There’s huge amounts of discretion throughout the immigration-enforcement process, and “reasonable suspicion” is just one of them. One of many.

And what about so-called Kavanaugh stops, where people have recently been detained based on their race or ethnicity, after a Supreme Court emergency ruling last year seemed to allow that for immigration enforcement, even if it is not allowed for regular cops?

Border Protection specifically was previously allowed to use race or ethnicity as part of the reason for stopping someone during immigration enforcement, but it now seems that ICE is interpreting that recent Supreme Court ruling as giving them carte blanche to stop anyone based solely on race or ethnicity.

When you were working as a bureaucrat at D.H.S., and then later in the Biden Administration in a more senior role at ICE, what was the culture of ICE? You said some of the self-enforcement mechanisms have been gutted under Trump. But what was the prior culture within the place?

So, I think perspective is everything here. I come from a civil-rights background. I thought that there were good starting points. For example, detention standards were a good thing. They are being weakened now. There are a number of sets of detention standards that apply to different facilities that are holding people on behalf of ICE around the country. And those cover everything from the provision of medical care to the safety and security of the facility to environmental health-and-safety standards and religious accommodations.

There were generally good-faith efforts made to create the rules, regulations, and policy that undergirded ICE’s mission. I tended to think that the rules and regulations should have come faster and better, but that was also the position I was in. I was supposed to be trying to push them to be better. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.

And what about once you rose to a political position in the Biden Administration?

I did not agree politically with everyone I met at ICE, and I didn’t think that that mattered a huge amount. Most of the people I interacted with were professional and tried to do a good job and viewed the ICE mission as an important mission that they believed was underfunded. They took their responsibilities seriously. ICE is smaller, for example, than Customs and Border Protection. E.R.O. is pretty small, and interior enforcement has never got the attention that border enforcement has, but they took their job and the differences between the two seriously. Enforcement actions tended to be planned and thought through. There were written documents for them. They thought through contingencies and the need and desire to keep both the target of the enforcement action and the officers participating in the enforcement action safe. I think that’s changed over time, but that was something that I, and many other people who were involved with ICE at the time, took pride in.

How important is it for ICE to get coöperation from local law enforcement?

ICE has always worked closely with its federal, state, and local law-enforcement partners. That can be anything from serving on a joint task force to providing notice to local law enforcement when they’re going to do an enforcement action in their jurisdiction. There’s a million ways that you can coöperate. You can share information.

I think you may be getting at the issue of sanctuary jurisdictions and the idea that certain jurisdictions coöperate, more or less. And if that’s what you’re getting at, I would say that even sanctuary jurisdictions, even if somebody has a jurisdiction that has the title of sanctuary jurisdiction, there’s no real definition of what that means. And the level of coöperation can go up or down depending on the jurisdiction, but I don’t know of any jurisdictions who wouldn’t coöperate at all, under any circumstances.

As somebody who has served in ICE and understands the importance of conducting immigration enforcement in as safe and nonpublic way as possible, picking people up from prisons and jails is a huge piece of ICE doing its job well and within reasonable constraints. And so I didn’t love the sanctuary jurisdictions that wouldn’t coöperate with allowing ICE to pick people up from prisons and jails, but there’s all sorts of other ways to communicate and to coöperate, and that communication tends to be ongoing, even if a jurisdiction doesn’t share information about any particular person in its custody, for example.

So, some basic level of communication is important for public safety?

Correct. Yes.

That makes sense, but how do we think cities should be navigating this? City officials may not want to completely lose contact, for reasons of basic public safety, but also, when they see the various things that ICE is doing, it might make them wonder why they should be coöperating.

Yeah. I mean, look, at this point, I think every state and every jurisdiction is going to have to come to its own conclusions about what it’s willing to do and what it’s not willing to do. But, as somebody who has watched ICE for many, many years, what they’re doing now is unprecedented. And, to the extent that I thought coöperation was important—very important, previously—ICE now doesn’t seem to be following the typical rules of engagement. And I personally would be less inclined to coöperate in some of these ways that I think are really fundamentally important simply because of the ICE overreach.

ICE might tell a jurisdiction that it’s conducting an enforcement action in a particular place. ICE might actually ask for assistance in that enforcement action. Those are ways that sometimes communication happens that doesn’t necessarily entail, for example, giving the names of people who have been arrested, who the local jurisdiction believes is a noncitizen, to ICE. There are lots of other ways that coöperation happens. And, from the local position, they can also ask for assistance from ICE, either on a task force or just in individual circumstances. They can also ask for more specific pieces of information, like “Can you help us verify this person’s identity?”

The Washington Post reported that ICE is planning to spend a hundred million dollars on another recruitment drive, which will include looking for prospective agents at places like gun shows. Do you think the changes you’ve described are a function of new agents coming in? Are new agents less important than the messaging from the White House and ICE leadership?

There were always people within ICE who thought that they were being unfairly constrained. And I think that the Trump Administration has empowered that line of thinking, and those people, and “taken off the shackles.” And so ICE is feeling unconstrained in the way that it conducts enforcement. There are certainly people there now—not new recruits, people who’ve been there for years—who are thrilled with the direction that ICE has been moving in. There are also people who aren’t. ICE is not a monolith, and the people who work there do not all believe the same thing. And so I’ve heard from people on both sides of that since I left.

What concerns me is that the effort to hire additional people is leaning into what I would describe as the parts of the agency operating with the least control: the community sweeps, and the parts of interior enforcement that entail a visible, on-the-street presence. They’re trying to pump up those parts of the agency, which I’ve always viewed as the ones that need to be most carefully controlled.

And what about the lack of training? What effect might that have?

I would say, obviously, just the very idea that they’ve chosen to make the basic training for ICE recruits forty-seven days because Trump is the forty-seventh President tells you how seriously they take it. That’s not how you decide how much training somebody needs. You decide how much training somebody needs based on the type of job they’re going to be engaging in and the type of knowledge and information and practice they need to conduct that job safely. They are just looking to make training easier and faster as the number of agents continues to grow. And I think that that’s a very scary outcome.

What specifically scares you?

We’re seeing unconstrained immigration enforcement, and I think that that has a lot of bad outcomes. And I think that it is, to be honest, not in support of public safety. Law-enforcement officers are supposed to be public-safety officers. This, to me, feels like it is not only not supporting public safety but it is reducing public safety in the sort of unconstrained, aggressive, non-targeted mechanism that they’re using to conduct immigration enforcement. And, by surging more people to do more of it, we’re going to have more bad outcomes.

I don’t want to sound naïve by suggesting that you can foolproof an agency within the executive branch from Donald Trump, but could the Biden Administration have done more?

It’s a complicated question. The short answer is, yes, of course there’s more that we could have done. Interior enforcement has always been the red-headed stepchild of the immigration system, and nobody’s wanted to pay that much attention to it when you have what are viewed as bigger problems, like border numbers. No Administration has unlimited energy and people, and so the focus was elsewhere. But I don’t want to put too much blame on anyone here. I don’t think anyone understood the level of aggressiveness that was going to be brought to immigration enforcement in the second Trump Administration. I think a lot of people thought it was going to be very similar to the first term, and it’s been so much bigger and so much more aggressive than anything any of us could have imagined.

We did do things that I was proud of that worked to constrain immigration enforcement. For example, the “sensitive locations” policy that said that there were certain places where you shouldn’t do immigration enforcement, like schools and hospitals, because community safety required that people have access to those locations. Courthouse enforcement is another. We significantly limited immigration enforcement at courthouses because we thought courthouses should be open to the public, and because important business has to get done there and we don’t want to discourage people from showing up. The enforcement priorities were really important. They focussed ICE’s limited resources on the people that most needed enforcement: public-safety threats, national-security threats, and recent border crossers. There was a clear understanding of who the targets were.

How would you describe immigration enforcement in the first Trump term? What’s changed?

I would say that in the first Trump Administration they tried to change the rules, but they were playing by the rules. Here, they’re not playing by the rules anymore.

How so?

In the first term, they would write new regulations. They would go through a long, involved process of changing a policy. They would still engage with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties when it had recommendations for changes in policy or practice. None of those things are really happening. The Trump Administration is largely just making changes and not going through typical processes, which is supposed to weigh all of the costs and the advantages and disadvantages and come up with a very thoughtful conclusion. Right now, they know what outcome they want, and they’re doing what they need to to get the outcome. ♦